Sports retail stores in a stadium are the one-stop place for sports lovers who love souvenirs and items with branded colors and logos of their favorite teams. This, therefore, puts retail stores with sports merchandises such as basketball team uniforms to another level, thus cannot have its items arranged in an unsynchronized manner. A retail store owner or sales agent will work tirelessly to ensure that he or she creates an environment that will make customers have the urge to buy the products and at times more than the planned items. This technique is visual merchandising, where a store is arranged appealingly and makes you want to buy everything on the shelves!
Visual merchandising is an easy technique to achieve for a sports retail store. You can choose to apply different methods to make the store look unusual enough to draw attention towards it. The ways you can use include:
1. Using Technological Equipment
With technology, you can achieve a lot for your retail store. Visual devices appeal more to customers than other methods than say, cloud computing services. Although both are equally important, as human beings, we are drawn more by things we can see and feel. Adding a flat screen to play an advert of new sports gear and merchandise at the store is one good way of drawing attention to the store. You can customize your advert messages in a manner that will direct the customers to a specific product or make them want to buy it. Through the advert flat screens, you can also display the promotional offers that your store has. Another additional technological item that you can add is an interactive screen for the customers to use. On the screens, you can have a catalog of the products you can have in stock and display them with captivating photos to draw attention.
2. Applying Different Themes
In your store, you can use different themes for different products to catch the eye of customers. Color is one of the aspects you can focus on for the themes. You can choose a color for the section with sports shoes and a different color for the stand or portion with jerseys. Cross-merchandising is also a great theme that you can apply to appeal visually to customers. On a day with a match of two rival teams, for example, you can have a full kit of both teams arranged neatly at the display beside each other to draw people into the store.
Applying visual merchandising to the retail stores in stadia is a form of marketing that has advantages to the agents at the stores. They may include:
- Reaping Profits from Sales. A well visually-designed store will gain profits from the sale of items. When a store appeals to the buyers due to the theme or the beauty of the synchrony, they may end up buying so much, some of which they had not planned on buying. This works well in expanding the business and to a great extent maintaining the stadium. Remember though that you will need to get some form of business computer support to ensure that the business runs smoothly.
- A high number of Customers. Whenever there is a game at the stadium, or on any other day, a visually appealing retail store will gain a lot of traction and attention. This will boost the sales and enable the agent to bring in new, better and unique products each time.
- Engaging and Inspiring Customers. When a customer watches an advert or interacts with an interactive screen, he or she gets more knowledge about other sports products and entices them to buy.
Visual merchandising is an essential addition to sports retail stores since it helps them draw attention and gain profits from the sales of their sports products.
Sports merchandise often appeal to the love of fans for a particular team and go a long way in showing love and support. As a result, many of the teams have taken to selling their branded merchandise by themselves or through salespeople. The main target of selling these merchandise is doing it at a place where you will find many sports lovers – a stadium. Sports stadia are associated with the clashing of teams after a title or friendlies to train together and gauge each other’s strengths. That not being all, stadium events are used to earn money through charging entry fees and sale of merchandise.
This profitable manner of marketing is being used by several sports teams to gain recognition. Selling at sports merchandise in stadia has the following benefits:
-
Crowd entertainment
Fans who choose to attend games are often out for entertainment and more hands-on experience. Selling product that is a perfect fit for entertainment. An item such as a vuvuzela is a great fit for entertainment. Other than cheering for teams, the fans blow them to psyche up players and add to the general feel of fun.
-
Give fans unique products
There are certain products that you may look for and not find until you go to a stadium. Items such as soccer boots may be sold at retail shops but are mostly found at stadia. These items sold here are also linked to the aspect of great quality. One of the reasons fans go to stadia for sports is to find merchandise that is unique and memorable. A hat sold in a Melbourne stadium, for example, that has a team’s logo and a great design, probably camouflage is a memorable item that Melburnians would like to take home with them.
-
Perfect fit for all
It is in stadia that you will find sports items that will appeal to one person to the other, thus catering for the diversity in interests and preferences. For a tech-savvy fan, there may be flash drives or phone cases that have been printed by teams’ logos or colors. Selling such products at stadia goes to show that sports identify diversity and means to capture interest to everyone is of interest. Customized sports gear such as customisable basketball jerseys and other sports-related products, therefore, are sold to reach out to the fans and to give each one a souvenir for commemoration.
-
Focuses on practicality
A fan would want to buy an item that he or she can re-use on several other occasions whether sports-related or not. Therefore, a fan would go for a water bottle or a wrist band that has a sports theme, which can be used in other scenarios. The chief marketing officer for Jetline, Dan Zezzo, provided a listing of the products sold at a stadium that appeal to the practicality aspect such as drinkware, beach balls, sunglasses, and bottle openers. These items will be used severally after the game is over. An item such as the vuvuzela can be used in subsequent games, hence is also a practical item sold at the stadium.
-
Revenue for the stadium management
Other than the entry fees, stadia need other sources of funds for maintenance and cleaning. Selling sports merchandise is a great way in which they achieve this. Owing to the number of fans that go to stadia to watch games, a lot of money is sourced from the products they buy. Selling these sports products may also be a channel from which teams market themselves to the world.
Sports merchandise at stadiums is an idea by teams and the sports management to give fans a different feel of entertainment as opposed to watching the game from home.
